"Thorns" Is...Wow
Or, hell, but make it space.
🌌 ½ (out of 🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌)
Director: Douglas Schulze
Screenplay by: Douglas Schulze
Cinematographer: Jack Chaney, Tom Chaney
Starring: Jon Bennett, Cassandra Schomer, Bo Shumaker, Doug Bradley
I think my thoughts on 2023’s “Thorns” can best be summed up as “WTF?” Here, we have a movie that takes some interesting concepts, mixes them with lots of gore and great monster makeup, and then adds terrible acting, an incredibly dumb plot, and terrifically bad dialogue to ruin the whole thing. I never go into movies like this one expecting much, but this ended up being way below the already-low bar I set for it.
Gabriel is an ex-priest, now a NASA consultant, who has been called out to a remote observatory to figure out why the place suddenly went dark. The scientists there discovered a far-off planet and received a radio signal from it, only to suddenly stop communicating with the outside world. Once Gabriel arrives, he discovers the walls of the building papered with pages from the Bible, a nearly-dead scientist who rips his skin off to become an entirely new creature, and a highly traumatized nun chained up in the basement (because all observatories come equipped with shackles?). Together, he and the nun (and some priest who video calls in occasionally) must figure out what the signal is and what it means for Earth.
Okay. Let’s start with the good. The monster here looks fantastic. Schulze was heavily inspired by “Hellraiser,” so the monster plays off that, and whoever was responsible for creating the thing did a kickawesome job. The crown of thorns digging into the eyes adds a nice touch, particularly in light of the film’s religious aspects. A+++ for that.
Also, some of the special effects were pretty good, and this film is high on gore, which was nice to see. I really appreciated the “Un Chien Andalou” moment where there’s a close-up of a guy slicing his eyeball open (well, okay, I’m not sure “appreciate” is the right term, but you know. It was a nice reference.) The monster ripping its way out of the scientist’s body was excellent, too, especially when it tears the guy’s face right down the middle. Definitely a lot of fun with the effects here.
But, alas, that is about all of the positive things that can be said about “Thorns.” Because the rest of it….?
The plot is barely held together with spit and glue, while the dialogue seems much more focused on the characters having philosophical discussions (and super simplistic ones, at that) about evil than furthering any kind of plot. Gabriel repeats the same lines more than once in this film, mere minutes apart. The plot wanders from “here’s a new planet that the scientists have randomly decided is hell” to “we must stop this signal from taking over the world or hell will be unleashed!” to “haha, just kidding; hell is already here.”
There’s absolutely no flow from one point to the next; it’s almost like the cast simply improv’d the whole thing, and that’s why for the whole movie the monster runs around as just a monster but suddenly 10 minutes from the end of the film, the monster is suddenly being referred to as the “Necronaut,” as if this isn’t just a word someone suddenly threw out. Like, there’s a mythology now? 10 minutes before the film is done? Wild.
And the acting? Jon Bennett is completely emotionless for the entire film. At one point, he’s yelling in agony, and he just stands there with his mouth open, going, “Ah! Ah!” with no facial expression whatsoever. He’s so chill about everything, you’d almost think he was stoned, if it wasn’t for that whole ex-priest thing. In one scene, he pulls a worm/slug thing out of the nun’s face and throws it into a toilet, only for the thing to turn into a much bigger worm/slug thing. The new creature pops its head out and starts growling/screaming, and Gabriel just sits in a corner staring at it. The only way you can tell the character is supposed to be frightened is that the camera gets all shaky and Bennett occasionally flinches. It’s so bad.
Cassandra Schomer is better as the traumatized nun, I’ll give her that, but only by a bit. She at least expresses emotion, and because her character is mute, she has to rely on a lot of physicality and some sign language to get her thoughts across. Schomer’s traumatized nun is also much more of a badass than Gabriel.
Let’s not forget all the continuity errors, either. They were mostly small things, so I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t notice many of them. But when one shot shows the nun’s bare feet, and they’re clean, then in the next shot her feet look like she waded through dirt and mud, there’s a problem. And when you have several small things like that, they add up and distract from the film.
I dunno. “Thorns” had a super-interesting concept with the whole religion + space thing that was clearly heavily inspired by “Hellraiser” and “Event Horizon,” but the whole thing was so bland and boring, so poorly acted, and so nonsensical, that watching it is a chore.